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COLLAPSE: CLIMATE, CITIES & CULTURE focuses on the design community’s response to environmental urgency, using architectural models, design prototypes, drawings, and videos to frame and advance this vitally important conversation. COLLAPSE is not a dystopian future-scape, but is in fact our “right now.” The Directors of Global Design NYU believe that designers must join or initiate interdisciplinary efforts to find solutions for our current state of planetary peril.

COLLAPSE estimates that one species goes extinct every seven minutes and this rate may be up to 1000 times faster than evolutionary norms. In our exhibit design, the empty cages represent loss, or voids, in our natural world. They are like coffins for species whose graves we will never know, whose lives we will never learn about. The exhibit design also features over a ton and a half of e-waste, lent to us by environmental waste management company. E-waste (products with batteries or cords) contain poisonous heavy metals, chemical flame retardants, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). As our world becomes more interconnected, our production of e-waste is skyrocketing. Interconnectivity may save the planet in some ways, but its harm is already evident.

The practices and projects selected for this exhibition come from a myriad of disciplines and operate at multiple scales, in a range of forms—constructed works, materials and systems research, community development, speculation, and philosophy. These diverse projects are joined by their shared focus on improving the health and well-being of our fragile planet and all of its occupants. Design will help to determine how we face our current and future collapse.

The shift away from ecology towards climatology in Norwegian environmental policy in the late 1980s and 1990s was not accidental. A main mover was the Labor Party politician Gro Harlem Brundtland who did not want to deal with unruly and highly vocal Deep Ecologists. Better then to start afresh with a different set of environmental scholars appealing to the technocratic tradition within the Labor Party. Instead of changing the ethical and social ways of dealing with environmental problems as the Deep Ecologists were advocating, she was looking for technological and economic solutions. And she mobilized an international regime of carbon capture storage (CCS), tradable carbon emissions quota (TEQs), and clean development mechanisms (CDMs), all of which eventually were approved in Kyoto in 1997. This move towards technocracy and cost-benefit economics reflects a post-Cold War turn towards utilitarian capitalism, but also a longing to showcase Norway as an environmental pioneer country to the world. The underlying question was how to reconcile the nation’s booming petroleum industry with reduction in climate gas emissions. Should the oil and gas stay underground and the country strive towards the ecologically informed zerogrowth society the Deep Ecologists were envisioning? Or could growth in the petroleum industry take place without harming the environment as the Labor Party environmentalists argued?

This book examines the possibilities for scaling design solutions to address global warming.

Global warming poses new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can designers make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local cultures and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, this book proposes a new global design initiative. The aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. These featured projects showcase leading-edge design innovations at multiple scales. Global Design directors Peder Anker, Louise Harpman, and Mitchell Joachim discuss various ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation between humans and the natural world.